Earls has always had a good eye for cultural strangeness, so his readers will perhaps not be totally surprised to learn that the title story concerns a stopover in the oddly named town of Normal, Illinois. The narrator, a young Australian business executive, accompanies his surly American-born boss on a buying trip for their Queensland mining company. On the surface, things seem familiar to the narrator – all around him is a movie-made America, a land of highways and diners and green banknotes. The people, however, prove much harder to fathom. This is especially the case with the put-upon wife of one of his boss’s old college drinking buddies. Having been saddled with showing the narrator the sights of Normal, this lonely woman reveals her ambition to restore the city’s rundown art deco cinema: ‘I have an attachment to everything not becoming faceless and forgetting itself,’ she explains. As with most of the stories in this collection, the final note is a hopeful one, suggesting that, even in the blandest of places, strange flowers might yet bloom.

Lives of quiet desperation are also the norm in ‘Merlo Girls’. This short study of modern anomie is narrated by a Brisbane surgeon who has recently abandoned his career because of an arthritic condition; the title refers to the city’s best-known coffee merchants (or, more particularly, to their alluring female staff). The narrator finds himself in the company of a fellow doctor’s boorish husband, a loud-mouth property developer; like the business executives in Illinois, these two middle-aged men are also on a kind of road trip, buying the posh coffee that most people cannot afford. Their bleak shopping expedition is a salutary reminder that anyone banging on about ‘social networks’ in this so-called digital age is peddling snake oil. Conversation seems no more possible with the lovely Merlo girls than it would be with Botticelli’s Venus. Their youthful confidence is simply too estranging, even if, like the property developer, you happen to have the latest model iPhone; no device, the story implies, can bridge the generational gulf. (It may be significant here that Earls himself is now teetering on the edge of fifty.) Still, there is another faint glimmer of hope at the end – a muffled gesture of never-quite-right friendship between these two very different men.

Road trips, male bonding, the manifold varieties of loneliness: these are the major themes woven throughout the collection. Brisbane anchors most of the stories, though there are extensive sojourns in Andalucía, Arizona, California, and Taiwan. The prose is invariably transparent and swift-moving, its pace bolstered by the hip dialogue that Earls likes to put in his characters’ mouths. Only occasionally are there flashes of the author’s trademark humour – mainly in the book’s centrepiece, a novella-length account of an Australian couple bickering their way around Spain. (Irrespective of how much he might know about Google or the indie music scene in Glasgow, the middle-aged narrator of this story understands that the younger members of the tour party have already pigeonholed him and his irascible partner as a pair of ‘old farts’.) It is also striking that most people in Welcome to Normal have their daily lives constantly mediated by the gadgets of contemporary culture. The characters are often technophiles – habitual emailers and web-surfers, aficionados of BlackBerrys and smart phones. But not always. In ‘Range’, American military personnel stationed in the Arizona desert pore over grainy satellite images of Afghan farms in order to direct missile strikes; the forlorn narrator, a staff sergeant, has already learned the bitter lesson that technology’s supreme danger is its power to make reality seem less real.

The final story in the collection might be read as offering an oblique comment on Earls’s own literary career. Here the narrator is a Queensland winemaker undertaking a trade mission to Taipei; against an alien backdrop of plush hotels and futuristic skyscrapers, he spruiks his premium shiraz to the local buyers and critics. With the wolves of debt already camped at his door, the narrator knows that lowering his high standards might soon become inevitable; this could even entail selling his wine through a chain of Australian-themed bars (the theme being the frenetic alcoholism of Birdsville race meetings). The lure of prosperity is a powerful one, but all the narrator has ever wanted to do is ‘make really good wine’. In this respect, his dilemma is not unlike that of fiction writers faced with that Faustian bargain between quality and quantity. The story suggests that selling well does not always mean selling out – that sometimes one’s best work can still be done at the back of the shop.